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Royal Winnipeg Ballet By Emma DoranGoing Home Star - truth and reconciliation

I attended the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s latest commission, Going Home Star, with eagerness and a drop of apprehension. How do I “judge” or describe the representation of this history that is so integral to present lives, policies and dialogues? Who am I to do this?

Multimedia experimentation is the driving force behind Symphonie 5.1, a platform for applying video projections as a light source, working to reveal dancers’ bodies, or a sense of them, rather than showing other pre-recorded images alongside them.

monumental by The Holy Body Tattoo was a major highlight at this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. It grapples with contemporary themes such as the anxiety of urban life – modern society’s persisting anxiety – and an increasing interaction and dependence with technology. And though not narrative, the social and political threads root the work, making it relevant and relatable.

The Book of Love is a dense, multi-layered exploration of filial love, sexual love, maternal love, violent love. Often tragic, sometimes hilarious, all elements combine to create a highly entertaining experience.

Zoja Smutny’s Rosé Porn is the culmination of her two-year residency at Dancemakers. In it, Smutny reshapes the performance space as an arena of possibility and potential, rather than a platform for the delivery of entertaining product.

The collaboration of Malgorzata Nowacka and Anjelica Scannura delivered, in one short hour, a variety of movement styles, nuanced performances and a bridge between traditional and contemporary performance traditions.

Featuring choreography by Benjamin Kamino and Tedd Robinson, lifeDUETs for Karen and Allen Kaeja is a meditation on how the emotional polarities of a long-term partnership are, in fact, not oppositional but cut from the same cloth.

Sitting in the Agora on opening night between a trained dancer seeing Stamos’s work for the first time and an established sound artist familiar with his oeuvre, I couldn’t help but see Situations as a sequel to Husk, with much of its symphonic elements, but also something new: a twinge of indeterminacy.

The Sleeping Beauty, perhaps one of the most beloved ballets of all, usually takes three to four hours to perform. Younger audiences can easily become bored, even at the most gorgeous and enthralling performance. Enter Canada’s Ballet Jörgen, with a shorter, reimagined version of this classic.